Painting Wizards paints houses, roofs, complexes and commercial property in Retreat and across the Southern Suburbs. Send the form on this page with what needs doing and we will come out, measure it and put a written price in front of you — itemised, so the preparation and the paint system are separate lines rather than one number.
What Retreat property is like to paint
Retreat is largely mid-century plastered brick housing, single storey, on regular stands, with some light industrial towards the station. The property mix is freestanding and semi-detached houses, plus commercial frontage.
Salt reaches further inland here than people expect – a coastal-grade exterior system is usually the right specification even a few kilometres back from the water.
What Retreat weather does to an exterior
Retreat sits in the Southern Suburbs, which gets between 900 and 1,200 mm a year on the mountain side and the wettest winters in the metro. The result is wind off False Bay carrying salt inland, combined with high winter rainfall.
Across Southern Suburbs the practical consequence is damp, rising damp and flaking on shaded south elevations, and a repaint interval of five to seven years, shorter on a wall that never sees sun. A coating put on over a failing one fails at the rate of the layer underneath it, not at its own — which is why the preparation, not the paint, usually decides how long the job lasts.
What we do on site
- Damp diagnosis first — rising damp, penetrating damp and condensation look alike and need different fixes. Painting over any of them wastes the job.
- Fungicidal wash — mould and lichen are killed, not covered. Painting over live growth is the difference between a five-year job and a one-year one.
- Breathable systems on old lime plaster — sealing a wall that carries moisture traps it, and the paint comes off in sheets.
- Exterior — walls, trims, gutters, fascias and boundary walls, booked around the winter rain rather than into it.
- Interior — walls, ceilings, skirtings and joinery.
- Roof — moss and lichen treated before any coating goes on.
Two coats over a prepared surface is standard, but on this side of the mountain the sequence matters more than the count: fungicidal wash, then drying time, then primer, then topcoats. A litre covers roughly 6 to 8 square metres per coat on smooth plaster and 4 to 5 on rough or porous work. We allow 4 to 6 hours between coats in summer and considerably longer in winter, and about 7 days for a full cure — which is why exterior work here is booked for the drier months rather than squeezed between fronts.
Getting a written price
Painting is priced on area, surface condition and the number of coats, so nobody can give you an honest Retreat figure over the phone without seeing the surfaces.
The quote states the square metres measured, the preparation included, the system specified and the number of coats. Where damp is present it says what was found and what has to happen before painting, because that is the part that decides whether the job lasts.
To start, we need the suburb, whether the work is inside, outside, the roof or a combination, roughly how big the property is, and what condition the surfaces are in — sound paint, flaking, damp, or bare plaster.
Nearby areas we cover
Painters Claremont · Painters Constantia · Painters Epping · Painters Kenilworth
See painters in Southern Suburbs for every area we cover in this part of the Western Cape.